You’d think Against the Odds: Insights from One District’s Small School Reform by Larry Cuban, Gary Lichtenstein, Arthur Evenchik, Martin Tombari, and Kristen Pozzoboni, would be just my kind of book. After all, it’s a story of a low-performing, urban-suburban district just outside of Denver that works mightily to transform itself into a district that guarantees that each student can “achieve his or her dreams.”

We need stories about school districts that actually succeed in producing results for kids, so I was really looking forward to this book.

Unfortunately, it just gave me a headache. It documents everything that is nonfunctional in American education. I should rephrase that, because it doesn’t document everything that is nonfunctional—this is not a story of out-and-out incompetence or neglect, of which this country certainly has its share. What it documents is the impassioned, well-intentioned flailing of seemingly smart, dedicated, competent, and hardworking people who are led astray by educational faddishness.

In this particular case, the faddishness takes the form of an ideological adherence to a particular form of pedagogy and a particular school structure.

I always liken arguments about pedagogy and school structure to arguments about modes of transportation. Is it better to travel by bicycle, car, or airplane? Bicycles are healthy, cars are flexible, and airplanes are fast. You can have lots of heated arguments about which is better. But the first question to answer is, Where are you going? If you’re going to the store, a plane is impractical; to India, a bicycle is impossible.

We must first decide where we’re going and then make decisionsabout how to get there. In the case of schools, we must first decide what children need to learn and be able to do over the course of their 13 school years and then allow form (pedagogical approaches and school structures) to follow function.

Against the Odds is a chronicle of a district that got that backwards. And the result was that the district failed its kids miserably.

Mapleton, Colorad0, a district with a bit fewer than 6,000 students, went from being just about all white to about two-thirds Latino over the last couple of decades. Over the same time, academic achievement dropped—so low, in fact, that the state made noises about stepping in and doing something if scores on the state tests didn’t rise.

A new, energetic, smart superintendent (according to Against the Odds) recognized the challenge and built support in her district for radical transformation. She would break up the large, semi-dysfunctional high school into very small high schools—no more than a few hundred students each. The theory—and this was in the early part of the ‘00s, when this was a beguiling theory—was that high school students felt disconnected and invisible in big high schools, and smaller schools would be more personal. So far, so good.

She got grants from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation and sought help from Gary Lichtenstein, head of Quality Evaluation Designs, to document the transformation in a book. He recruited Larry Cuban, a Stanford University professor emeritus considered one of the foremost historians of American education, and a few others. Together, they conducted surveys and interviews and looked at budgets and other documents to get a full story. Against the Odds is the result.

Back to the superintendent: She and teams of folks spread across the nation looking for successful small-school models that they could import. The criterion was that their pedagogy needed to be “constructivist,” a vague term I’ll probably mangle in describing, but here goes:

Constructivism is a widely held theory of learning that holds that all knowledge is constructed within the individual mind.

Constructivism as a pedagogical approach attempts to use that insight from philosophy and neuroscience to apply to the classroom. So constructivist classrooms are supposed to lead students to construct their own knowledge by providing challenging environments in which students pursue their interests and passions and take charge of their learning.

Again, the theory behind the Mapleton transformation was that if kids felt known, and if they were in charge of their own learning—which would be built around projects rather than direct instruction (that is, where teachers are in charge)—they would be more engaged, work harder, stay in school, and eventually, do better on those pesky state assessments.

That was the theory. The reality is that the grownups in the district ended up spending such enormous amounts of energy, thought, and money working out the logistical details of many small high schools instead of one big one (the bus schedules alone sound nightmarish) that improving instruction took a back seat.

At the end of all this upheaval, test scores are actually lower than the awful levels that spurred the transformation.

Because the book doesn’t have the latest scores, I did some digging, hoping that perhaps 2009 scores showed an improvement in the kids’ ability to read, write, and compute, but I was disappointed. There are a few ups and downs, and there’s a bit of evidence of faster growth in 2009 than in previous years. But there was no big surge to validate the approach of focusing on structure and pedagogy over content.

There was, however, one school in the district that stood out. York International is not doing fabulously, necessarily, but roughly the same proportion of the kids are reading, writing, and computing as in the rest of the state. Sometimes the percentages are even higher. And this isn’t because the school only has white, middle-class students. More than half the students meet the qualifications for free and reduced-price lunch, and almost two-thirds are Latino.

Because York International appears to be the standout success of the district, I went and looked at what the school had to offer. It is the one school that adopted the International Baccalaureate (IB) program, a coherent college-preparatory curriculum that focuses on building the vocabulary, background knowledge, and skills that students need to be well-rounded, educated citizens. The IB program asks students to accomplish fairly high-level projects and regularly assesses teachers to see if they are adhering to the program’s international standards.

In other words, the IB starts with the “what” and allows the “how” to follow.

Assuming that all is on the up-and-up with the test scores, if I were a parent in Mapleton I would want all schools to learn from the relative success of York International.

Unfortunately, Against the Odds confines itself to describing the excruciating difficulties of implementing a reform (establishing small schools) with fidelity. This puts it in the ever-expanding literature of case studies of how difficult it is to fundamentally change school districts. No news there.

What would have been news is if Against the Odds had parsed the apparent success of York International. My suspicion, as I have said, is the IB curriculum itself deserves some credit, but that is a hypothesis that certainly needs testing.

Educators are hungry for information that will allow them to help their students—particularly low-income and minority students—succeed academically. York International appears to have some lessons to teach, and it’s too bad that Against the Odds didn’t mine whatever wisdom the educators in that building may have.